Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (86)

Philip Legrain proposes LVT in preference to VAT over at The Guardian and reaps a rich harvest of abusive nonsense.

The pinnacle is a long rant by Eachran, which contains the following nugget: "Rent? It doesn’t exist and neither does land value except in fantasy economics and accounting. How some of you people can use the word value without blushing is shocking." and culminates with this:

It beats me why anyone would want to tax a physical creation of society as a whole that endures beyond generations for society as a whole. Perhaps someone can explain other than using the practicality excuse which I accept, of “cheap and easy”.

To which I responded:

That is the whole point (on a moral level, let alone the economic advantages). It was society as a whole that created these values, so why shouldn't the profits be collected by the government and used to:

a) Reduce taxes on income and output and personal efforts, and

b) Once all other taxes are phased out (and the national debt paid off), to dish out the receipts to "society as a whole" as a Citizen's Dividend?

It beats me why you think that the income and profits from a state protected monopoly/cartel like land 'ownership' should be generated by society as a whole and then privatised by a few (bearing in mind that yer average person is both homeowner and worker, i.e. for the average person, the two net off).